Oh! what a triumph for the TV Nancy

The people’s Nancy: Jodie Prenger on stage at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane with the cast of Oliver!

JODIE PRENGER, the people's choice for the part of Nancy, was cheered to the rafters at the opening night of Oliver!

Even Andrew Lloyd Webber, who had backed her rival Jessie Buckley in the TV reality casting show, admitted she was a triumph.

Hugging the 28-year-old singer, he said: "The show was probably the best production of Oliver! I've seen. The public got it right. It's fantastic. She's great."

Even the show's notoriously reserved star, Rowan Atkinson, celebrated his return to the stage with the rest of the cast at the Waldorf hotel afterwards.

Asked how the performance had gone, he said: "It was very good, better than I thought it would be." Harry Stott, 13, from Henley-on-Thames, who played Oliver, added: "It was so much fun, it was great. The crowd was so much better than it's been so far. It's unreal."

The director, Rupert Goold, said they had battled against cynicism over casting Nancy through the BBC1 show I'd Do Anything. But he added: "The kids [in the cast] and the audience make you less cynical because they're so up for it. Jodie's great and the boys are great as well. Rowan is known for two parts - Blackadder and Mr Bean - but he's a sophisticated performer.

"I'm proud of the show where it is and it will get better and better and grow. Where Dickens was dark, the musical is euphoric. But you want a feelgood story, especially now." However, theatre critic Michael Coveney, of The Independent, was less enthusiastic about the production, which has already taken £15million at the box office.

He said Atkinson, as Fagin, was "fairly good, fairly funny, but he can't sing very well, and keeps missing the beat". He added: "And what about Jodie Prenger, the people's choice as Nancy on the highly enjoyable BBC television talent show I'd Do Anything hosted by Graham Norton and supervised by Andrew Lloyd Webber? Oh dear."

Michael Billington, of The Guardian, wrote: "Not even the expertise of the staging and a handful of fine performances can disguise the essential thinness of this piece of deodorised musical Dickens. Lionel Bart may have been a great tunesmith, but he was a maladroit storyteller; what his version misses is Dickens's social anger and Gothic strangeness."

But in contrast the Daily Mail's Quentin Letts said today: "Here is a production to blast away all those recession cobwebs hanging over the West End. Oliver! will suit everyone from family audiences to Blackadder fans, every audience target group from connoisseurs of the weepie to lovers of sheer theatrical spectacle."